What women want (and what they'll pay for great sex)

By Margaret Burin and Joanne Shoebridge

A racy exploration of female sexuality, 'A Woman's Deeper Journey Into Sex' unpacks the notion that women need an emotional connection to have great sex. The humorous documentary is screening at the Byron Bay Film Festival.

The film's protagonist, Private Detective Lacey is on a quest that takes her to the US, UK, Australia and Canada, to look at different aspects of female sexuality.

Director Sally McKenzie started exploring the concept with women who pay for sex and the men who deliver the goods.

Lacey is also drawn to Jamaica to investigate the well-established 'rent-a-dread' market.

"She comes across a range of women and a range of men, who actually sell sex to women," McKenzie says.

"Since the 1970s, that we know of, as soon as it became safe for women to travel by themselves, women have been travelling to places like Jamaica and seriously gifting the local boys, having long-term relationships with them, going back each holiday and shacking up with them for two or three weeks and looking after them during that time."

McKenzie says women being able to pay for sexual pleasure is simply a matter of equity.

She believes it is becoming more common for women to be on the receiving end of the sex industry.

"Men can buy, literally, whatever they want and it seems to me that in Western culture women should also have that opportunity.

"There are just normal everyday women, especially in Brisbane, that I've spoken to that don't have time for relationship and like to compartmentalise it in terms of sexual satisfaction."

McKenzie also uses the film to delve into the 'so-called cougar movement' and increasing use of pornography among females.

"A woman that lives in LA, she brought up the concept that one of the online porn facilities...is reportedly supposed to have something like 300 million online users a day, and that a third of those users are women, which some people thought was extraordinary.

"I don't find it so extraordinary, it just says something about who we are and what we are and where we're going.

"When I went in and accessed it, I was a bit taken aback about the way women are depicted in porn; I find it offensive mostly, I think it's degrading, so the film does lightly touch on that as well."